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This is no joke. While this album sounds great in the privacy of your own home as you enjoy your favorite flavor, the music is actually being played on ice cream trucks around the country by vendors who were looking for something new to play on their trucks. Over fifty trucks are currently playing the music.

Some have suggested Michael’s project came from a desire to defeat the domination of the Mr. Softee theme in a sonic battle for the Brooklyn streets he calls home but Michael refuses to acknowledge such hostility.

Michael Hearst grew up in Virginia Beach, VA. He earned a degree in music composition from Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a founding member of One Ring Zero. Hearst also operates Urban Geek Studios in Brooklyn, where he has produced, recorded, and ate ice cream with a number of bands including Guided By Voices, Kansas, and The Blasco Ballroom. His album with One Ring Zero As Smart As We Are features musical collaborations with a number of book authors including Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster and Dave Eggers. Michael Hearst has given lectures at Tufts University, The San Francisco Art Institute, and taught at Virginia Commonwealth University; but unfortunately, all of the classes and lectures have been about music, not ice cream.

Quotes

Michael Hearst has transformed one of the most overlooked, yet most insidiously infectious forms of American popular song into a rumination on summertime, innocence, and the music that lurks almost inaudibly in the margins of our lives.

— John Hodgman

Whenever I listen to this album I find myself screaming. What about you? Shouldn’t you scream? Shouldn’t we all scream for this album?

— Lemony Snicket

A miniaturist masterpiece, it somehow feels as crucial, in a tiny, strange, magical way, as the trucks of summer whose fleeting melody it invokes.